Investing in Urbanism: The Business of Walkable Cities With Brad Biehl, Real Finds Podcast #41 Transcript
Brad Biehl: Your economic health, your physical health, your mental health. Ask the question of what method of transportation, and as a result, what type of neighborhood, facilitates and empowers you to have the best chance at enhancing all of those aspects of what it means to be a healthy and successful person. By and large, walkability and walkable neighborhoods give you the best shot at that.
Gordon Lamphere: I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast, where we interview key entrepreneurs, activists, and researchers who are shaping real estate and, as a result, our world. On today’s podcast, we interview Brad Biehl. Brad is an urbanist, podcaster, community leader, and advocate for a more walkable urban world. We dive into the concept of urban living, what walkable cities mean, the tragedy of parking minimums, the power of public transportation, and why livable urbanism is ultimately good business. It’s well worth a listen. Brad, thanks for hopping on today.
Brad Biehl: Of course. Thanks for having me, Gordon.
Why Urbanism Matters to Investors
Gordon Lamphere: Why is urbanism important for an investor? A lot of folks on this podcast say it’s all about the bottom line. What makes urbanism important to somebody thinking about their next development?
Brad Biehl: The bottom line thing is interesting, because there are a lot of arguments that urbanism goes hand in hand with it. But at a high level, whether you’re talking about transactions or livability or walkability, people are at the center of it. And let me define urbanism, because there are differing understandings. Unfortunately, you hear about these ideas in the news when it’s some fringe version that clouds people’s understanding. You’ve probably heard fifteen-minute cities discussed in a negative, dystopian light, where they only want you within fifteen minutes of your house and you’re not allowed to leave your zone. That is not what anyone I know in the urbanism conversation in the US is proposing or endorsing. At its core, we’re talking about looking at zoning laws and development patterns and changing them so people can access what they want and need on a daily and weekly basis within fifteen minutes of home without having to get behind the wheel of a car. For most folks, that’s a logical thing they’d actually like. Anecdotally: where do people go on vacation? They go to big cities like New York, where they don’t have to rent a car, or to Disney World, which at its essence is a fake walkable city where you park your car and enjoy a dense, walkable environment for a week. People pay thousands of dollars for that.
Something I’ve been talking about a lot is the National Association of Realtors’ updated community and transportation preferences survey. Every single generation indicated they’re willing to pay more to live in walkable neighborhoods. Ninety-two percent of Gen Z said they’d pay more to live in a walkable environment, but the majority of every generation, from the Silent Generation on down, said something similar. From a bottom-line perspective, if folks are willing to pay more for something, that’s good for business.
What a Walkable Neighborhood Actually Is
Gordon Lamphere: What really is a walkable neighborhood? Disney World isn’t a reality for most urban areas. What’s walkable in practice?
Brad Biehl: I love that distinction, because when you say density or anything alongside walkability, people think of New York City, massive skyscrapers, no space to breathe. We take the most extreme imagery of a concept and apply it as the norm. There are very walkable suburbs and very walkable small towns hours from big cities. These principles aren’t inherently big, dense, metropolis-based ideas. They’re principles of small-scale development patterns and built infrastructure that facilitates the safe travel of people, individually and in groups, without requiring the purchase and upkeep of an automobile. Tangibly, it doesn’t look like a cheaply thrown-together slab of sidewalk beside a fifty-mile-an-hour road where we say, there’s a sidewalk, this is walkable now. A lot of people say, why isn’t this area considered walkable, it has a sidewalk? And a lot of the time, the person saying that has never actually tried to walk on it. Those comments often come from city leaders who haven’t walked their own sidewalks or tried to bike in what they call a bike lane, a single line of paint with cars whooshing by at fifty. It’s not about checking a box. It’s about the experience a person has in that place. A protected bike lane protects the cyclist and lets older folks and kids feel empowered to move on their own, but it also provides safety for drivers, who feel more comfortable with a buffer so they don’t accidentally end up in a situation that alters their life forever. I know there’s rhetoric from our side that seems to villainize drivers. That’s not my stance. We’re on the side of making it safer for everyone to move about. So tangibly: protected sidewalks, protected bike lanes with concrete buffers or planters, public spaces activated along the routes people actually travel. Anything that gives people a reason to get out of the automobile and try a different way to move. It’s on us to build environments that give people a reason to try, not to tell them, go do it on this terrible piece of infrastructure and good luck.
The Protected Bike Lane Debate
Gordon Lamphere: It’s important that you touched on suburban walkability. I live in a walkable suburb. My wife commutes downtown by train three or four days a week and uses the car maybe once a week, to go to Costco. But in Chicago and around Illinois, there’s a real fight between drivers and cyclists over protected bike lanes. Playing devil’s advocate: what advantage does it give a driver to remove parking and create a protected bike lane? In Chicago, that’s hotly contested.
Brad Biehl: From a basic standpoint, we have about eight parking spots for every car on the road in the United States. It differs block to block, but by and large we’ve overparked the country, which a lot of people don’t know because they’re thinking of the one place where they can’t find parking. So when we propose taking out on-street parking on one side and putting in a protected lane, business owners and drivers are hesitant at first. What I’d say first is that it’s an exciting prospect to get folks who’ve never tried being a pedestrian or biking as a primary mode to do so, and building real infrastructure that lets them move in a new way gives that a real chance. I’m very hesitant about half measures that kill full measures in the long run. When cities build stripped-down bike infrastructure, like a sharrow, the bike symbol painted in the middle of the driving lane, drivers hate it because the bike is in their lane, and I can tell you those of us who bike hate it too, because it’s the scariest environment to be in. It makes everyone more hostile, and it creates a situation where people who don’t bike say, we built this and nobody’s using it, we wasted the money. Then when real changes come up later, people are more opposed. So build the actual infrastructure first, because people will actually use it. For drivers, we’re widening the group of people who can use these ways of getting around. We’re not building lanes for the same people who bike now. We’re building them so kids can bike to school, so older folks can get to the store on their own, so people can try something better for their health, their wallet, and the long-term upkeep of our cities. People get spooked by the upfront price of a bike lane, but road maintenance cost is heavily based on weight load. Cars have gotten bigger, electric cars are heavier than combustion vehicles, trucks are bigger. We’re putting more weight on our streets, so they need repair more often, and that’s a cost we’re indirectly incurring. Investing in real infrastructure up front gives people an option that frees them, and it gives cities money back to spend on more enriching services than replacing blacktop every few years.
Parking Minimums and the Retail Argument
Gordon Lamphere: I can look out the window and see retail heavily reliant on parking, and I’ve worked with retail tenants whose biggest concern, even in walkable areas, is parking. If I’m a retail tenant, why is a walkable neighborhood that removes parking better for my business?
Brad Biehl: First, on parking minimums: when you remove a minimum, you’re not telling developers they can’t build parking. You’re saying they aren’t required to build a certain amount. That’s important, because something that drives me crazy on my side of the conversation is people saying “big bad developer,” when developers aren’t choosing these minimums. They’re forced to build in line with them. Removing minimums gives more choice to the developer and to what they’re hearing from tenants. If building A truly needs that much parking, maybe they still build it. But across a whole city, less parking gets wasted, because buildings C, D, and F didn’t need it. If you’re building dense housing on a transit line, why build massive parking when most people are moving there because they want to be on the transit line? The average parking garage costs tens of millions of dollars, and we pay for that somehow.
On the business side, I’ve gotten to know small business owners like Barry Green Jr., who runs a plant and record shop in Richmond, Virginia. Barry intentionally chose a space without off-street parking, because the customers he wants and relies on live in the neighborhood. By creating a human-scale approach to the store, with bike parking and potential parklets, he’s creating a community-centered space that’s better for business, because people feel it was built for them to spend time in, not for people passing through to stop for five minutes. Anyone in real estate knows space is at a shortage, especially in cities. That’s why a studio near a city center costs so much. Yet we don’t apply that logic to parking. One parking space is about the size of an average bedroom. Two are the size of a studio apartment. Why is a parking space that might cost $100 a month the same amount of room as an apartment at $1,500 a month? Space used for one thing isn’t used for another. I’m never going to say every business that needs on-site parking is wrong. That’s ludicrous. But there are a lot of circumstances where that space could be better allocated. We know people who arrive on foot or by bike spend more time in an area and are more likely to engage with more of its businesses. If you drive to one store and leave, you’re not staying on that road. I just moved back to Columbus, Ohio, and we have an abundance of what we call stroads, a hybrid of street and road that doesn’t know what it is: people driving fifty-five, terrible sidewalks, crosswalks a mile apart. People aren’t going to that street to do multiple errands. They go to McDonald’s or Kroger and go home. When I walk down High Street in the Short North to the Kroger, I pass forty shops I go into at different times, so I stack errands and stimulate more economic activity. For developers, mixed-use areas allow more of that. For small businesses, positioning yourself there lets you reap the benefits of people who stumbled on your shop and became returning customers.
Gordon Lamphere: Some of our service and retail businesses discovered that outdoor space, particularly for restaurants and breweries, was much better used as tables than parking. In suburbia and moderately dense areas, that’s been a game changer. Have you seen that outside of COVID, or was it unique to the pandemic?
Brad Biehl: Cities were doing it in 2019 and prior, but it didn’t get national headlines until COVID made it a national idea. It’s an example of a tough time creating a moment where people realized: if one car parks here for an hour and pays a couple of dollars at the meter, or nothing, that’s one customer. But if I create a space where twelve to twenty people sit outside and turn over every forty-five minutes, that’s a lot more money staying with my restaurant. I worked with a group in Dallas a couple of years ago, a very car-centered, sprawling area, and they experimented with it. We did projects in the Bay Area. I’ve seen it in Columbus, especially in warmer months. The New Yorks, Chicagos, and LAs have had success, but it’s cool to see it in a Dallas or a Columbus, places that aren’t transit based, still say this one parking space has more value as a community or business space than housing one dormant vehicle for a few hours.
Buses, BRT, and Light Rail
Gordon Lamphere: I like my bike, but other modes matter. My wife takes the train downtown, and a lot of employees at businesses we work with take the bus. One big fight in public policy is buses versus light rail. When I lived in DC, the light rail became a huge spending issue. What would you say to a community looking to add transportation options?
Brad Biehl: Before you get into cost, where I’ve seen compelling arguments both ways because of the short-term versus long-term piece, I think buses are more palatable to folks who aren’t from transit-oriented cities. Even in city offices, people can wrap their heads around bus rapid transit: this road already exists, you’re telling me we take a lane and allocate it to a bus. That feels more palatable than laying track. In actuality, you have to do a lot of the same things for either. You’re still changing intersections to prioritize transit. You can’t put in a BRT lane and leave the stoplights the same, or you’re still at the mercy of traffic and it’s just a normal bus. The difference is you’re doing it on a pre-existing lane and retrofitting the pavement for the heavier vehicle, usually painting it red.
Gordon Lamphere: Can I break in? Explain the difference between BRT and a traditional bus system. A lot of listeners have no idea.
Brad Biehl: A traditional bus system is what you’ve seen in your city: a bus on the road with the rest of the cars, traveling in traffic. Those are still great, and I ride the bus a lot, but you’re at the mercy of traffic, so you don’t have reliable travel times, so the average person with a choice won’t choose it. That leads to a whole slew of perception issues about who rides buses. It’s very hard to convince a working person with kids to choose the bus when it’s three times the travel time of driving and you don’t know when it’ll arrive. BRT eliminates that. Like light rail, BRT has its own dedicated lane, usually painted red, sometimes buffered, and general single-occupancy vehicles can’t use it. Emergency vehicles might. Regardless of traffic, the bus arrives on time. You also change the stoplights to give the bus priority. It’s essentially light rail on wheels. A normal bus is a car with more capacity, which solves some problems, but it doesn’t make transit a widespread daily option the way BRT does.
Gordon Lamphere: Light rail can be pretty expensive. What’s the calculus between light rail and BRT?
Brad Biehl: It depends on who you ask and how you calculate. By many metrics you’re looking at a few hundred million per lane mile for light rail, which is not that dissimilar to a road, and that’s an important point. People think it’s astronomically more than building highways the way we do, and it isn’t. Long term, light rail often has far less maintenance than roadway or BRT, for the weight-load reason. When was the last time you didn’t see a highway or road near your house being worked on? That’s what you get with anything road based: constant maintenance from asphalt wearing down. Light rail is easier to automate in some places and to project long term with less maintenance. But on upfront price, BRT is, for the most part, more affordable, and from a perception standpoint, more stomachable for American cities coming from car-centered mindsets. They can get more public support and less backlash. So it depends on how you measure cost, but usually BRT is a bit cheaper up front.
Livable Design
Gordon Lamphere: You’ve talked a lot about livable design. How would you define it?
Brad Biehl: There’s a multi-pronged look at what it means to be a healthy person: economic health, physical health, mental health. Ask what method of transportation, and as a result what type of neighborhood, gives you the best chance at enhancing all of those. Walkability gives you the best shot. Biking is a close second, but I say walk first because it’s accessible to more people. The average new car costs $48,000 as of last year, used cars around $35,000, and most people spend ten to fifteen thousand a year on maintenance, insurance, and so on. We talk about the cost of housing without looping in car costs, which are the second biggest expense for most people, all going into a depreciating asset that loses half its value when you drive it off the lot. If you gave that argument to someone not already entrenched in the American way of life, it’s a tough sell. But our built environment makes it tough to move around every day without a car. So financial health is bettered by a walkable or bikeable neighborhood. Then mental health: studies show walking is good for cognitive function and memory as you age. Then physical health: baking low levels of activity into everyday life is a great way to avoid the burden of going to the gym for an hour a day, which is tough for people with kids and a job who didn’t come from a sports habit. Many of the healthiest countries in the world have far fewer gyms per capita than we do, and we probably lead the world in gyms per capita, yet our population is unhealthier. Those countries don’t have big pinnacle workout moments, but they have exercise baked into their lifestyle. Livable neighborhoods bring more people along.
We often conflate two things. We have nice houses in car-centered suburbs, so people say, I like my neighborhood. Then you ask what they do in their neighborhood, and a lot say, I mostly do things at my house. So is your neighborhood livable, or is your house livable? Those are different. Neighborhood function matters more than ever, with the Surgeon General talking about an epidemic of loneliness. If we want a real grassroots change, get people outside, in their neighborhoods, from a young age and as adults, engaging intentionally and serendipitously with neighbors and businesses within a few square miles of home.
Cars and Freedom
Gordon Lamphere: The biggest thing I hear from car-dependent friends is that cars are the epitome of the American dream and freedom. What would you say to someone who wants as car-dependent a society as possible because it means the most freedom of movement?
Brad Biehl: As a disclaimer, my girlfriend and I are car-light. We share one car, and she primarily drives it. I’m not anti-car. My goal is to get people to wean off cars as a dependency. I’m anti-car dependency, and I think it’s important to say that, because of how our side comes off. But the freedom note is one of my favorite things to talk about. We talked about the cost of car ownership. When I pay car insurance, I don’t see it as freedom. It feels like a handcuff I’m required to pay to move from point A to point B. Freedom is about choice. If we have freedom, we should be able to choose how we move, not be told we have to buy a $48,000 two-ton block of metal. The freedom argument is: you’re free to buy something, but you’re also required to buy it. Is that actual freedom or the perception of it? Walking and biking are freedom because you’re not paying for them the same way, and you also have the choice. If I have a two- or three-mile trip, it would be nice to choose whether to walk, bike, or drive. Most people in the United States don’t have that choice. You have to drive, or good luck. And when housing near job opportunities is so expensive, especially for lower-income populations, it’s tough to tell people they can’t live near work and their only option to get there is the most expensive way to move. It also incurs a cost on the city. A car isn’t an independent individual cost. There’s a massive cost laid out to society and your city or suburb at large.
NIMBYism and Soft Density
Gordon Lamphere: A lot of folks would choose more public transit, but people don’t want it in their backyard. Evanston, close to where I’m speaking, has worked with its mayor, council, and city manager on that, and communities all up the North Shore are working through it. What’s your advice to a community that wants to make that change?
Brad Biehl: A big part comes back to perception. We’ve done a poor job explaining what we mean by density or transit-oriented development or anything that feels anti-suburb. We need to get the image out of people’s heads that density is skyscrapers and concrete on top of each other. That’s a harsh view. What most people on the YIMBY side, pro-housing and pro-transportation choice, are talking about is a softer form of density throughout the urban fabric. In most cities, you have a skyscraper and then two blocks later single-family homes start. There’s a harsh contrast because we’ve made it illegal through zoning to build missing-middle housing: townhomes and smaller apartment buildings. I know developers eager to build small apartment buildings who can’t, because the building code requires two stairwells, so an eight-to-ten-unit building is no longer viable. Or the city arbitrarily requires two parking spaces per bed, so they have to build a lot next to the building and the math doesn’t work. A lot of it is changing the perception of what density is, because transportation goes alongside it. Softly dense neighborhoods are really enjoyable places. They don’t feel like a concrete jungle. They feel like a great green neighborhood that happens to have a few more residents. The NIMBY position is always interesting to me: I love what I have so much that other people aren’t allowed to love it, because that would mean I have less. Inherently, if you and your neighbors love a place, it makes sense others would want to live there too. I understand the challenges, and I’m not here to criticize anyone’s personal belief, but there’s a way to build more housing or transit that doesn’t sacrifice your quiet parcel of land but lets others enjoy the space too. I’ve lived in places that didn’t have a transportation line and then got one, and my life got a lot better. Yes, some neighbors got a little closer to my house. But I could access places in a way I never could before, my community felt smaller and more manageable, and running to the grocery store became jumping on the streetcar, where I could sit and work on the way. You get productive time back. The fear is folks getting what you have. I’d argue you could get something you don’t have right now by allowing these things closer to your home.
Gordon Lamphere: Most of our developments are industrial, and it’s always fascinating: everybody wants their Amazon package same day, but they don’t want the logistics that allow it. Sometimes the reason something is the way you like it is the very thing you’re fighting against.
The Final Four
Gordon Lamphere: First question, one of my favorites: where do you see transportation and our cities changing over the next ten years?
Brad Biehl: I have my ambitions, but I’ll stick to my practical hunch. BRT is going to be something a lot of mid-to-large American cities really dive into. Part of why I moved back to Columbus is that we’re finally getting momentum on BRT lines and protected bike lanes around the urban core, so it’s becoming viable to move around a decent part of the city without a car, not just for someone like me used to biking in car-centered space, but to bring a family along, and parents who’ve never biked. Other cities of that two-million-plus size are grasping the idea, so we’ll see preliminary networks getting built. It’s tough to be totally thrilled by that progress over ten years, but the built environment moves slowly. I also think we’re having positive housing changes. Minneapolis has seen housing costs become more manageable because they followed the urbanist playbook: changing zoning, removing parking minimums, removing height maximums, especially along transit corridors. Because they’ve been successful at sustaining affordability, other cities will do similar things. And an important note for the folks we talked about: it’s not going to take away from the suburbs and that style of life. We’ll see places that have both, and drivers will have more choice in how they get around.
Gordon Lamphere: If you could look back and give yourself one bit of advice, what would it be?
Brad Biehl: I’m still pretty young, but I wish I’d biked and walked more to practical destinations as a teenager. Like every kid, I was excited to get my driver’s license. Looking back at where I lived, my friends and I could have had so much fun if I’d moved the way I do now, and I could have brought a lot of folks along and built great habits. Looking toward parenting years: let your kid get out and move in their environment, give them the autonomy to bike and walk places, find safe routes, go on rides and walks with them, and empower them to move. It frees their time and yours. I’d also tell myself, it’s cool you got your license, but especially in a smaller community, it’s really fun to explore different ways to get around.
Gordon Lamphere: I’m a big reader, mostly audiobooks, because sadly I’m somewhat car dependent for work. What book should our listeners pick up?
Brad Biehl: A two-pronged answer. The first is about eight hundred pages, the longest book I’ve ever read: The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup. If what I said today doesn’t fully convince you, or if it does but you want more math and data, he’s the god of parking research as it pertains to urban economics. He’s at UCLA, and his research is centered on parking’s impact on cities from the economic standpoint, which for me is the most compelling argument and the one we’ll have to keep leaning on. The book covers studies from cities around the US and abroad on how to effectively charge for parking, what you can do with those funds, and how to use parking as an economic tool to get the true value out of that land and reinvest it in walkable neighborhoods. If you can stomach a textbook-style read, or at least get a synopsis or watch his talks on YouTube, it’s very compelling. For an entry-level read, The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs is the planning and urbanist bible. She wasn’t even an urban planner. She was a mom living in New York, then Toronto, who became a leading voice against Robert Moses’ effort to put highways through Manhattan, and rallied support to preserve Greenwich Village. She has a digestible view of what a good city is based on how cities actually operate versus how we think they should, from observational learning sitting on park benches. It came out in 1961, but if you didn’t look at the date, you’d think it came out last week. It talks about organic safety, building so more eyes are on the street at all times, which is the best way to achieve safety at low cost. Streetfight is another simple, entry-level one about New York City’s transition to a more pedestrian-friendly space over the last couple of decades, written by the city’s former transportation commissioner. And Jeff Speck’s Walkable City and his other books are good entry-level reads on walkability and urbanism.
Gordon Lamphere: I’ve got a reading list that takes me back to law school. Now the whole reason we created the podcast: who should we have on next?
Brad Biehl: I love it, because you get introduced to people you wouldn’t have sourced yourself. One who popped into my head is Barry Green Jr., the small business owner in Richmond. We lump business owners into a category of being anti-bike-lane and pro-parking, as if they’re the main voice on that side, so people like him are interesting because they’ve intentionally oriented their business around a walkable environment as a strategic advantage for building a loyal customer base. He also runs a blog called Density Dad about raising kids in a dense environment by choice, and the advantages of parenting in a place people think isn’t where you’re supposed to raise kids. There are also smaller-scale developers focused on missing-middle housing. One is Coby Lefkowitz. He’s one of my favorite follows on Twitter, talks about architectural beauty, and develops small-scale projects in that missing-middle zone in New York and California. Super nice, easy to talk to, with a unique perspective at a young age, because he comes at it from the developer angle but is very much on the side of urbanism and walkability. They’ve both been on my show, and I can attest they’re good conversations.
Gordon Lamphere: We’ll bring them on. One final question: if someone wants to reach out and learn more about you, what’s the best point of contact?
Brad Biehl: I use Instagram and TikTok primarily, because a lot of what I share is short-form video. On Instagram I’m @bbiehl, B-B-I-E-H-L, or @in.goodtraffic, our podcast channel. On TikTok it’s @citiesforpeople, but if you search my name it’ll come up. I’m fairly active in my DMs, depending on what clip we posted that week. I’d love to connect with anybody on these conversations. And I appreciate you having me on, Gordon. I’m in no way saying cars are evil or that if you drive you’re a bad person. I always like to end with that, because people take this personally sometimes. We’re not anti-car or anti-driver. We’re examining car dependency as an overall function and how it could be improved. I’m grateful for the time and for your audience, and hopefully we start some new conversations.
Gordon Lamphere: Happy to have you on, and we’ll have you on in the future, maybe talking more about NIMBYism.
Brad Biehl: Would love it. My favorite topic.
Gordon Lamphere: Thanks again to Brad. We appreciate his insights. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a five-star rating, or a review. Your comments, interactions, and subscriptions truly matter and help us continue to provide quality guests. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast. Thank you for listening.
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